Expressing technology: a roundtable with James Dyson

On 14 September, Wired hosted a roundtable with Sir James Dyson
at our New York offices. Dyson and his staff began by showing off
their new vacuum cleaner (the
DC 41) and Dyson Hot, a new
fan/space heater, which was being introduced later that day.

We asked Sir James questions about every aspect of emerging and
commercial technology, ranging from intellectual property and
education reform to the overlap between Steve Jobs' design
philosophy and his own. We learned (among other things) why
research and development in battery technology and artificial
intelligence are critical to the future of household cleaning, and
why it's harder to sell high-end vacuum cleaners in China and
Brazil.

Wired's interviewers included Steven Levy, John Abell, Jason
Tanz, Dave Mosher and Tim Carmody. Dawn Lim, Dave Mosher and Tim
Carmody transcribed the conversation. Tim Carmody moderated the
roundtable, edited the responses, and wrote this introduction.
Except where noted, all images are courtesy of Dyson.com.

On becoming the company's public face and
namesake

Sir James Dyson: The first Dyson was a
13th century female cattle rustler in Lancashire. That's the origin
of the name. And it's two syllables, so it's quite nice.

Right at the beginning, the retailers wouldn't take me, because
they said, "you're not a brand name. Nobody's going to want to buy
a 'Dyson.' They'd rather buy an Electrolux, Bosch, or Siemens" or
something like that. The only way to overcome that was to be a
person. They're all big, anonymous corporations, and the founders
are long since gone. So the thing is to be different, and to be
responsible for what you do.

That's why I put myself about a bit, as you say. And I put
myself about a bit now to understand what's going on in the world,
rather than spending my time back where I'd probably rather be,
actually: with the engineers, developing new products.

On the relationship between design and
technology

Dyson: We're a technology company. We're
employing more and more scientists, and working in lots of - we may
be in more prosaic areas, we're not in this sort of sexy things.
Thing that people don't bother with, that need technological
improvement, which makes a big difference. That's what interests
me.

So that's our starting point. We look at something that has a
problem, whether it's hand dryers or vacuum cleaners. Then we
develop technology. We want the product to express the technology
we're using, so that people understand it. Even if they don't
totally understand it, they might half understand it. Even if they
only one-quarter understand it, at least they see that we're doing
something different that makes it work better, and perhaps gives
them a bit of pleasure to see that and point it out to people.

[Picks up a copy of Wired] When you say design, everybody thinks
of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's
how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much
everything. It's the technology it uses, how it's engineered, how
it's put together, the quality, how long it lasts.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where
you make everything into a black box - simplify it. I want
something more expressive. It's very easy to make something like a
heater into a black box. It might look impressively designed for a
few moments, but it has no expression.

That's why our heater shows its technology; the heating
component, and that's the main part, is bright blue. It's a very
simple product, but at least it still expresses what it does. And
it looks different, it doesn't look like an ordinary heater. On the
vacuum cleaner, we show the bits that really work, like the
cyclones. That's the important bit, and we want people to
understand it, to know that it's more efficient than a bag, but it
also looks nicer than a bag. In the whole experience of using it,
the customer can start to follow the trail of the engineers and
scientists making it.

The retailers said, "you'll ever sell a vacuum cleaner where you
can see the dirt." I'm not normally one to do market research, but
we did a bit of market research, and the research confirmed it: no
one wanted to see the dirt. We made it see-through, by the way, to
see what was happening. It was very practical. But the engineers
and I loved it. So we decided to ignore the market research. Our
competitors had a good snicker about it. But we persevered.